Without thees meters, the Utilities would have to build a boatload of new plants, to deal with cloudy/windless days, or roll blackouts - neither of which is very popular.
Bob, you may not have been keeping up with news on the energy front lately. Electric power generation from wind and solar is on the wane, and existing boondoggle facilities are being taken off-line all over the country.
That news isn't anything but a blip in the national leftmedia because it's an enormous failure of their green agenda, but the data's all over the place in the alternative media.
It’s more than a blip - we had rolling blackouts in Texas a few years ago because the wind stopped blowing in the Western part of the state. With Smart Meters, no blackouts...just AC units (and then refrigerators and God knows what else) going off. And no more having to buy super-high priced power in the spot market during those real-time shortages.
I’m as tin-foil hat as they come - I still pay cash at toll booths (where they accept it, otherwise skip toll roads). My cell phone STILL doesn’t have GPS. I will defeat Smart Meters when necessary. But I still also know that typically databases are created not by evil people, but by well-intentioned people. It’s only later that Evil People see what capabilities they provide...and then they get hijacked.